Dale Herigstad: The user experience of television has been for a long timelooking at a television piece of furniture in a home about 10 feet away.That was the old way that you defined television. It's been completely redefined,of course, recently. If you go to a media company now, you go to ABC and say,what are you now to your audience? It really isn't-- there are three big categories,the way they divide it up, in say broadcast, two foot is on the computerInternet and one foot is mobile.At Schematic we divide up slightly differently. It's saying that still sort ofanchor common experience, a communal experience around the friends and family, looking at television about 10 feet away with remote control. But thenyou have a line where you are looking at either a computer or on a personal device as a personal experience. That's really one person consuming this rather than multiple.

Then a new area for us has been public media where it's really maybeone person consuming but many people looking. So it's the opposite of private.It's an open kind of public screen viewing and the distance is quite variable.You might have one person three feet away, like this, but you might have people 200feet away with a large screen that could see that. And there have beenexperiments, of course, like in Times Square with your mobile phone, where at a great distance people see huge screen that's being interacted with a mobile phone or something.So that's quite a bit of variety in that last one. This is important to usbecause one of my passions at Schematic has been into gestural navigation,through work on {italic}Minority Report{/italic}, which is what I call distance gesture. So,this line is a critical one. When you are in reachable distance to touch the screen, that's what we call touch gesture. That's the iPhone and it's a pureand beautiful experience. I love my iPhone. I love surface. I love these thingswhere you can touch the screen and many kiosks are touchscreen because it'svery understandable. Here is the thing. I touch it and it responds. That's veryunderstandable.

A harder assignment is when you can't touch it. This is the territory that weare exploring a lot within the company. Now that includes 10-foot navigation,because you can't -- most of the time you don't get up from your chair andchange the channel. You have a remote control. So we are even moving on herewith input things where we can actually use your hands to gesture with noremote at all or use a gestural remote to remote.So we are experimenting with those kinds of things, which are advancedprimarily by things like the Wii or all these things are making it more kind ofmainstream, the idea of gesture.

I often show this screen as well because I would point out that in theinteractive world a lot of the production and client base or clients, when theythink about making an interactive product for themselves, this is of coursea starting point. It's the web. It's two feet away and even has a mouse.The important thing to realize that on this spectrum of all these screens anddevices, that's the only one that has a mouse. So when you think about that andyou think about making content that's going to go across media, it can't be somouse-centric. It has to open up to that sort of almost closer to televisionup/down/left/right navigation, which is far more consistent with most mobilephones, PSP, game devices, all of these.

So this is a big idea and I think one of the big lessons we have been learninghere as we train a lot of people coming from the web, designers coming from the web,we have to train them into this other kind of navigation moving totelevision and to radial navigation. So that's a big part of the training thatwe do here.

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Released

4/1/2009

Welcome to the future of media experience. Meet Dale Herigstad, Chief Creative Officer at Schematic—the company behind some of the most innovative ways to interact with your world. Remember the scene from Minority Report where the Tom Cruise character physically interacts with digital media? Dale was the mind behind that scene—and the mind that is bringing similar experiences to the real world. Dale and his company, Schematic, are transforming the future of user interfaces, brand relationships, and advertising. This installment of Creative Inspirations takes viewers inside their profoundly collaborative and innovative environment—where new ideas seamlessly integrate across multiple platforms. Experience why Dale says, "the interface is the brand."